Umbrellium, Marling, 2012. Photo Credit: Igor Vermeer, and Vermeer Fotografie. Courtesy of the artist.

Digital Revolution
July 3-September 14, 2014
Barbican Centre
Silk St.
London
barbican.org.uk

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Zhang Dali, Square-Sketch No. 4, 2014.
Acrylic on canvas, 39 3/8 x 31 1/2 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Zhang Dali: Square
June 21-25, 2014
Klein Sun Gallery
525 West 22nd St.
New York City
kleinsungallery.com

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Richard Serra, 2000, 2000. Weatherproof steel. Courtesy of Dia:Beacon.

Richard Serra’s more recent corten steel works are designed to solicit a visceral reaction. Their sheer size and imagined weight serving to emotionally flatten the viewer while at the same time setting our survival instincts all a-tingle. Fight the urge to run.

James Turrell, Roden Crater, 1979-2011. Courtesy of the artist.

James Turrell’s Roden Crater presents a viewing experience not only massive in scale and a long time in the making, but an experience that serves to create a relationship between the viewer and the passing of heavenly bodies. Plus, it’s in the middle of the desert. Road trip, anyone?

Carsten Höller, Vitra Slide Tower, 2014. Courtesy the artist.

Carsten Holler has long been a fan of weightlessness. He has installed slides in many of his exhibitions and has gone so far as to present an apartment building model where slides are the main form of transportation from top to bottom. This new towering outdoor slide work looks very inviting and almost too playful.

Ann Hamilton, The event of a thread, 2012. Photo Credit: Kemi Ilesanmi. Courtesy of the artist.

Ann Hamilton knows a little something about fun art as well. Let’s not forget how mesmerizing recent work at the Armory was. The gorgeous shimmering of this giant white veil compounded by our own back-and-forth motion as we enjoyed the swing left us speechless. We still have goosebumps.

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Steven Lichty, Untitled, 2014. Basalt and taxidermied cat 78 x 12 x 12 in. Courtesy of the Artist.

Stephen Lichty
May 10-June 28, 2014
Foxy Production
623 W 27 St.
New York City
foxyproduction.com

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The golem is an animated anthropomorphic creature from Jewish folklore, created entirely from inanimate material. The being was said to carry out terrible deeds, and in medieval texts was formed from terracotta and activated by an ecstatic ritualistic act. Ghenie’s reference is the creation of a radical idea in society; let loose to change its socio-cultural environment. The artist also uses the golem as a metaphor for modern artificiality and simulacrum.

These concepts are placed in context with an installation. Ghenie’s paintings are presented alongside a specially created chamber. This installation environment is titled The Darwin Room and is built within the white cube space of the gallery. The installation is crafted from meticulously sourced 18th century panelling, floors, and furniture juxtaposed with contemporary items, and illuminated by an internal window said to reference ‘post-enlightenment thinking.’ The installation is a recreation of the attributed-to-Rembrandt’s painting Philosopher in Meditation, 1632 (Collection Le Louvre Museum, Paris). Ghenie demonstrates how a certain aesthetic form became the criteria for the European intellectual’s environment.

This environment suggests a space for academic contemplation, within which we are greeted by a space devoid of the figure yet surrounded by the slightly Baconian figures of Ghenie’s paintings. The artist references Darwin in his works as the protagonist of the transformative idea, yet absent from the installations environment of thought, instead replaced by the viewer. The paintings are separated from the white cube space by the installation, creating a boundary with the contemporary. The viewer journeys through the history of the transformative and transgressive thought referenced in the attributed to Rembrandt’s ‘Philosopher’, but the construction is also a stereotype of the idea of the academic and the intellectual; an old man in a darkened room surrounded by equipment; a jaded visual repetition, used as rhetoric for a noble scientific history.

Ghenie presents himself in Self portrait as Charles Darwin, 2014, oil on canvas. Here the artist is at once the arbiter of scientific change, the cliché of the tortured intellectual, and the anamorphic threat of the Golem; the idea let loose to reek havoc. All of these elements are present in Ghenie’s Bacon-esque brush strokes.

With a fluidity of paint the artist mingles his identity with that of the axiomatic historical figure; the blurring of the objective ‘Iconic’ with the subjective self. Adrian Ghenie highlights an era that questioned man’s significance, the existence of God, and the question of Creationism —through a use of paint that suggests the anamorphic nature of identity through the evolution of scientific understanding, and contradiction of the Baconian flesh that presents it.

By Paul Black

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As you enter the space, the first thing you likely become aware of is 270 degrees of cabinet, hang half open all the way around the three available sides of the gallery. They are desperate to be touched, doors all ajar. Yet, as they are hung tight to the ceiling, they are definitely out of reach. To your left, a fedora lies abandoned, upside down, holding a set of gambling dice. It references the absence of the artist as much as it entices the viewer to take a chance in staying a minute or two to absorb the work

Straight ahead, a small amp feeds music from a song playing off of a video in the back room. It leans menacingly at an acute angle from the floor facing a simple paper snowflake, which is choked between two layers of suffocating plastic wrapped over what appears to be a modest set of stretcher bars.

A clamp light on a cymbal stand is hung and left for dead on the right wall, face removed of it’s utility by a heavy wrapping of black plastic. It hangs perilously close to the plug that can give it life, yet is helpless to plug itself in, cord lying limply against the ground in solemn defeat. This piece perhaps most obviously states the artist’s intention of removing the useful nature of a given object in order to imbue it with a new purpose that is divorced from the original use of the thing we comprehend.

In the back room, a floor installed TV plays a series of video clips recorded by the artist on a trip across the US. Each segment shows Payne hiding behind a series of plein air landscape paintings. He plays the soundtrack to the exhibition on his acoustic guitar, sliding behind the easel that faces the viewer to play his song before sneaking away upon its conclusion without ever showing his face to the camera. These songs slink throughout the airspace intermittently, becoming the cyclical soundtrack of the exhibition, which build and wane with each passing of a song dedicated to a very specific vista encountered in the artist’s journeys.

One of the most startlingly beautiful aspects of this work is the artist’s attention to local light and the passing of natural time. As the sun goes down, the lights of the neighborhood bleed in through the glass front windows. We become silhouettes on the back wall; flowing reds, greens, and grays making the cabinets shift and slowly move around us like imagined planes in an abstract painting. They also serve to show ourselves to ourselves, as we are active observers whose likenesses are projected throughout the space.

As an ambulance goes by our reality is kicked into an excited frenzy, colored fragments of light dancing frenetically throughout the space. It reveals the exhibition as a multifaceted camera obscura, reflecting the interior experience, while returning one’s thought to the fact that this all exists in a state of some slightly morbid, existential flux. The patient in the ambulance may be fine at the end of the day, but the work seems to nod as the blinking lights fly by, knowingly acknowledging the possibility of immanent defeat.

Here the objects have not only suffocated from being separated from their utility, literally choked out by an impenetrable material, but die an honorable death of some sort, limply giving themselves over to this other world of deceased presentation. They exude an understanding that the hereafter will provide the viewer some sort of way out, a means to understand a new reality of the object that may only exist within the mind of the spectator. This seems to be fine with Samuel Payne. He has created this environment after all, and wants it to be a slowly opening bloom of experience. Like the selenicereus grandiflorus, it may only be alive to the viewer for one night, but if it blooms at all, that will likely be enough.

By Matthew Hassell

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Kara Walker’s First public installation with Creative Time is a sweet success.

Kara Walker: A Subtelty or The Marvelous Sugar Baby
May 10-July 06, 2014.
Domino Sugar Factory
316 Kent Street
Brooklyn
creativetime.org

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Sam Moyer, Breakers III, 2014. Glass, glass paint, plexiglass, and brass frame, 72.5 x 54.5 in.

Sam Moyer: More Weight
April 26-June 8, 2014. 
Rachel Uffner Gallery
170 Suffolk Street
New York City
racheluffnergallery.com

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PT: Alaska?
BM: (Laughs) I set out West just before my 19^th birthday. I intended to write stories, poems, perhaps a novel. I mostly smoked cigarettes and snowboarded.

PT: Why an art dealer?
BM:  Because, Pete, I know the deal. I’ve been around dealers of all kinds all my life. I’ve seen dealers sell bags of weed through mailbox slots in East New York, and I’ve seen people make multi-million dollar real estate deals, and everything in between.

I have been surrounded by artists, always have been: painters, writers, dancers, comedians, musicians, actors, rappers and poets.

They inspire me to create and live fully, and now I have an opportunity to share their work with the world. I’m a facilitator by nature and I absolutely love being at the confluence for all these creative individuals to come together and create dialogue. There is a wonderful ethos that is happening down here on Chrystie Street. I welcome the collaboration, the debate, the harmony and even the discord – those little moments when egos are diminished and the soul and the spirit of the converging energies involved take over. It’s really wonderful and exciting.

PT: You’re a creative person yourself. You’ve done all kinds of things. Writer, stand-up comic, professional basketball player in Europe, a business man, a fitness professional, a serious martial artist, and you were involved in the founding of Glasschord magazine, and that helped lead toward the gallery didn’t it?
BM: Yes, I have done all of those things and am still involved with many of them. These unique experiences have provided and helped me to develop good habits, strong character and solid values.  Studying Kung Fu provides the foundation for me to do my best as an individual, and Glasschord Magazine provided the foundation upon which Brian Morris Gallery is being built. The other founding members, Gregory MacAvoy, Noah Post (my assistant director), Daniel McCabe, Phil Moffa, Vijay Singh and Patrick MacAvoy along with all of the GC community, which include over 100 artists and over 100,000 subscribers have collectively played a role in the gallery’s growth and success. I would not be doing this without them.

The common thread is having always enjoyed being around and involved with creative people. Composer Eric Maltz of ‘Peculiar Gentleman’, plays piano in the gallery twice a month, and has opened the door for more musical performances in the coming months. Poet Michael Collins and I are developing a writer’s workshop and a reading series. Geoff Young of Geoffrey Young Gallery and artist Gary Petersen helped guide Noah and me through this first year of development. All the artists that have shown here, and will show here, are so gracious and enthusiastic about the space and the potential of BMG. A list of all the artists that I’ve worked with is available on the website.  In our first year, we’ve exhibited a solid group of emerging and mid-career artists.

Installation view of the Sleight of Hand exhibition. Image courtesy of Brian Morris Gallery.

PT: When did you open the gallery?
BM: We opened the doors December 11, 2012. It seems like a long time ago, already. So much has gone on in such a short time. I just added a backyard sculpture garden that can also be used for private events and performance. I intend to host theatre, poetry, music, comedy – whatever might lift the spirit of the community.

PT: What turns you on as a dealer?
BM: Truth, soul, rhythm the things you can’t fake.  Mainly, all of the little connections between art, artists, and visitors that brings life to a space. Being a part of what’s true and relevant and grand.

Knowing that I can introduce art to people, and inspire them to take a second look at their surroundings, and perhaps encourage them to look deeper into themselves is a big part of what excites me as an art dealer. To be able to invite and encourage others to paticipate more fully in their own lives.

PT: So then you must collect as well?
BM: Absolutely. I have a collection of work from many of the artists that I show. It’s quickly becoming one of my favorite parts of being in this business.

PT: Where do you see the gallery going in the future?
BM:  The gallery has been attracting a lot of attention as we come to the end of our first year. I would like to see the gallery become a cultural hub in the LES.

We are also looking to co-curate a 20,000 square foot warehouse in Bushwick with artist/curators Bonnie Rychlak and Peter Hopkins.

Coming up at the gallery we have some wonderful guest curators including Geoffrey Young and artist Rick Briggs. We will be showing work from artists such as Sean Greene, Michael Dotson, Brian Cypher, Jason Stopa and Russell Tyler. I also hope to see some new artists in here that I’ve recently begun a relationship with like Matt Phillips, Ruth Hardinger and Carol Salmanson. We have been hosting group shows up until this point, we may have some solo-shows in the second year program. Now, with the upstairs gallery space and the backyard sculpture garden, the dynamic of the gallery has changed immensely. The shows can now be even more exciting, more creative, include more artists, more work, more, more, more!

www.brianmorrisgallery.com

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